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<title>Stephen Fry and The Machine That Made Us</title>

<description>All six parts of a BBC documentary called <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/medieval/gutenberg.shtml">The Machine That Made Us</a> are on YouTube: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91smRXrEPRs">part one</a>, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qM0FKWpNTUc">part two</a>, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=souzdLjgrzM">part three</a>, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIur4eiOR38">part four</a>, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgNCvgSICbc">part five</a>, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWeMK-Q9NMQ">part six</a> (60 minutes total). (BTW, if you're in the UK, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/page/item/b009wynj.shtml">you can watch it on the BBC's iPlayer</a>.) The film stars Stephen Fry and tells the history of the Gutenberg Press. <blockquote>Stephen's investigation combines historical detective work and a hands-on challenge. He travels to France and Germany on the trail of Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press and early media entrepreneur. Along the way he discovers the lengths Gutenberg went to keep his project secret, explores the role of avaricious investors and unscrupulous competitors, and discovers why printing mattered so much in medieval Europe.But to really understand the man and his machine, Stephen gets his hands dirty - assembling a team of craftsmen and helping them build a working replica of Gutenberg's original press. He learns how to make paper the 15th-century way and works as an apprentice in a metal foundry in preparation for the experiment to put the replica press through its paces. Can Stephen's modern-day team match the achievement of Gutenberg's medieval craftsmen?</blockquote> Here's part one to get you started: <object width="425" height="355"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/91smRXrEPRs&hl=en"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/91smRXrEPRs&hl=en" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355"></embed></object> I haven't had a chance to watch it yet, but it's supposed to be really good. Oh, and if you're thinking "who does this Fry bloke think he is going on about technology like he knows something about it", you should <a href="http://stephenfry.com/blog/">check out his blog</a>...he's a top-notch tech blogger. (thx, <a href="http://www.textism.com">dean</a>)</description>

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<title>Most heard songs</title>

<description>What's the play count on your most played song in your iTunes library? My top five are: Emerge by Fischerspooner, 97 plays Alpha Beta Gaga by Air, 76 plays A Dream by Cut Copy, 68 plays Take Me Out by Franz Ferdinand (Daft Punk mix), 68 plays Around the World by Daft Punk, 66 plays Sixteen songs in my library have been played 50 times or more. More than 70 songs have been played at least 35 times. I'm wondering where that lies on the scale of obsession...do I listen to my favorite songs more or less than normal? If you folks can be considered normal.... ;)</description>

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<title>Slow motion</title>

<description><a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2188624/pagenum/all">Long rumination on the use of slo-mo in movies</a>, particularly in <a href="http://www.sonyclassics.com/standardoperatingprocedure/site.html">Standard Operating Procedure</a>. Being a slo-mo fan myself (especially when wielded by Wes Anderson or by NBC Sports during football games), I enjoyed this description of it: <blockquote>Slo-mo can be a mesmerizing revelation of the grace inherent in the ordinary.</blockquote> Slo-mo was invented and patented in 1904 by an Austrian priest-turned-physicist named August Musger. And who was working in the patent office in Austria in 1904? <blockquote>My fantasy now is that Albert Einstein -- working in the Swiss patent office in Bern in 1904, when Musger patented slo-mo in (relatively) nearby Austria -- might have become aware of Musger's slow-motion patent (perhaps it even crossed his desk?) and that contemplation of slo-mo might have influenced Einstein's thinking about the nonabsoluteness, the relativity, of time.</blockquote> Two other sort-of-related bits of Errol Morris news: 1) <a href="http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/10/play-it-again-sam-re-enactments-part-two/">part 2 of his short series on re-enactments is now online</a>, and 2) Morris will be talking about his new movie <a href="http://www.apple.com/retail/soho/week/20080420.html">at the Apple Store in Soho on April 23 at 6:30pm</a>. Prepare to wait in a long line. (thx, findemnflee)</description>

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<title>A short review of Momofuku Ko</title>

<description>I required redemption. When I arrived home two weeks ago after work, I was informed by my wife that I'd forgotten our anniversary. Eep. To partially make up for my cliched gaffe, I put my efforts towards getting a reservation at <a href="http://www.momofuku.com/ko/default.asp">Momofuku Ko</a>...<a href="http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/going-ko-ko/">the notoriously hard-to-get-into Momofuku Ko</a>.<a href="#f-0408081">1</a> We're big fans of the other two Momofukus, so I logged into their online reservation system and happened to get something for last Friday night. But this isn't a story about their reservation system; too many of those have been written already. Bottom line: the food is wonderful and should be the focus of any Ko tale. Two dishes in particular were the equal of any I've had at other more expensive restaurants. The first was a pea soup with the most tender langoustine. The second dish, the superstar of the restaurant, was a coddled egg with caviar, onion soubise, and tiny potato chips (<a href="http://goodiesfirst.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/03/31/momofuku_ko_coddled_egg_with_paddle.jpg">photo</a>). Didn't want that one to end. And I didn't even mention the shaved foie gras (with Reisling built right in!) or the English muffins amuse or the nice wine pairings. For the full food porn treatment, check out <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/kathryn/sets/72157604045218851/detail/">Kathryn's photoset</a>, <a href="http://www.project-me.com/2008/03/momofuku-ko.html">a review at Goodies First</a>, <a href="http://edlevineeats.seriouseats.com/2008/03/david-chang-didnt-want-me-to-write-this.html">Ed Levine's preview</a>, <a href="http://www.gourmet.com/restaurants/2008/03/firsttaste_momofukuko">Ruth Reichl's first look</a>, and <a href="http://thewanderingeater.wordpress.com/2008/03/27/elation-at-momofuku-ko/">a review by The Wandering Eater</a>. <a id="f-0408081"></a>[1] Two quick notes on the reservation process. 1. I spent all of five minutes on a Saturday morning making the reservation on <a href="http://reservations.momofuku.com">the Ko web site</a>. It can be done. 2. Chang and co. are serious about the web site being the only way to get into the restaurant. As we were leaving after our meal, a friend of Chang's and bona fide celebrity stopped in to say hi. After some chit chat, the fellow asked if he could get a reservation at Ko for the next evening. Chang laughed, apologized, and told him that he had to go through the web site. They're not kidding around, folks. <a href="#t-0408081">↩</a></description>

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<title>A beautiful baby portrait</title>

<description>My wife is a bit of a statistics nut. A few years ago, she hooked herself up to a heart rate monitor during a playoff football game and <a href="http://meg.hourihan.com/2004/01/pitterpatter-goes-my-heart">graphed the results</a>. Sometimes I think she does things just so she's got an excuse to open up Excel. So I wasn't really surprised when she showed me <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/megnut/2398917372/">this graph</a> yesterday afternoon: <img src="http://www.kottke.org/plus/misc/images/meg-weight.gif" width="500" height="336" border="0" alt="Meg's weight chart" /> That's a record of Meg's weight from when she got pregnant with Ollie to the present, 80 weeks of data in all...40 weeks with Ollie on the inside and 40 on the outside. Charles Joseph Minard may get all the accolades for <a href="http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/posters">his graphic of Napolean's march to Moscow</a>, but for me, the above chart is the most beautiful ever created. When I look at it, I see Ollie. The graph is a portrait of him, as sure as <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/megnut/1223448089/">this photo</a> is. It's also a record of an intense time for our family. I'm reminded of Meg, happy and pregnant but also struggling with her changing body. Trips we took, doctor visits, the growing belly and anticipation, the birth itself, and then falling off the cliff into the giddy, difficult unknown of new parenthood. And then you can see Meg slowly but surely getting back into shape while being a full-time stay-at-home mom (and managing an architecture project to boot), and achieving her goal of getting back to her pre-baby fitness level in a scant 8 months. You can't really see it, but there's a happy father and proud husband in there somewhere as well. That's a lot of emotional impact for a simple black and white line graph with few labels. Imagine if it were in color and isometric 3-D! ;)</description>

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<title>Last 100 posts, part 9</title>

<description>This is the ninth installment in an occasional series of updates to recent kottke.org posts. <a href="http://www.kottke.org/07/05/last-100-posts-part-8">Previous installment is here</a>, from almost a year ago. Eep. Two still-active threads: <a href="http://www.kottke.org/08/04/helicopter-on-a-turntable">will a helicopter on a treadmill take off?</a> and my favorite kottke.org thread in recent memory, <a href="http://www.kottke.org/remainder/08/04/15376.html">loads of people sharing words that they mispronounce on purpose</a>. Ben Saunders had to <a href="http://north.bensaunders.com/journal/entry/postscript/">break off his attempt</a> at a speed record to the North Pole after only eight days because of an equipment failure. The bolts on his skis snapped. <blockquote>Those few hours in the tent were some of the lowest of my life; I thought of all the people that had gone so far out of their way to make this expedition happen, of the weeks of intense preparation, the months of training and the years of experience, testing and perfecting everything from my diet to the design of the sledge. This expedition was the physical embodiment of one of the biggest and most audacious dreams I've ever had, and the whole thing hung from a giant chain that involved countless people, places, promises and pieces of equipment. It turned out on Friday morning that the weakest link of that entire chain was a pair of screws, each with a head the size of my little finger tip, and each snapped clean in half.</blockquote> Speaking of the cold north, I lamented the lack of charts in <a href="http://www.kottke.org/remainder/08/03/15243.html">this post</a> about the earlier onset of spring thaw in the northern hemisphere. <a href="http://www.tinyxl.com/">Erin</a> <a href="http://production.tinyxl.com/nenana/nenana_chart.gif">whipped one up for us</a>. Related to <a href="http://www.kottke.org/remainder/08/03/15225.html">these architectural offices in an old auto body shop</a> are <a href="http://london-underground.blogspot.com/2008/03/visiting-nabokovs-tube-carriage-offices.html">the offices of a small London start-up operating out of a carriage from the London Tube</a>. You want <a href="http://www.kottke.org/remainder/08/03/15269.html">strange restaurant names</a>? I give you, <a href="http://www.debeninns.co.uk/buttandoyster/">The Butt and Oyster</a>. (thx, <a href="http://bear-code.com/index.html">nick</a>) <a href="http://www.underconsideration.com/lostglasses/">The lost Prada sunglasses</a> have not been found by their owner. More <a href="http://www.kottke.org/remainder/08/03/15329.html">abandoned amusement park photos</a>: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/defekto/sets/582337/detail/">Maryland's Enchanted Forest</a> and <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/blackdutchdoublelibra/sets/72157601692140075/">Seoul's Dreamland</a>. (thx, guy & ross) <a href="http://www.kottke.org/08/03/the-business-of-parenting">The business of parenting</a> was a popular post...maybe I should turn kottke.org into a dad blog? Well, until that happens, here's a couple of related items that people sent in. First up is <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=76838288">an NPR story on teaching kids how to play</a>. Part of the solution discussed in the story? <a href="http://kottke.org/tag/deliberatepractice">Deliberate practice</a>. It's all connected, isn't it? And <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=19212514">here's an earlier related story</a>. (thx, michael & matt) Here's a tangential connection: <a href="http://www.kottke.org/remainder/08/03/15352.html">reading magazines within a Google Maps interface</a> is related to <a href="http://wetellstories.co.uk/stories/week1/">telling stories using maps</a>. And of course, there's <a href="http://labs.live.com/Seadragon.aspx">Microsoft's Seadragon technology</a>, demoed briefly at the start of <a href="http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129">this TED presentation</a>. (thx, <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/id/105532">barrett</a>) Back in January, <a href="http://www.kottke.org/remainder/08/01/14890.html">I linked</a> to <a href="http://nplusonemag.com/?q=node/418">an interview of a hedge fund manager</a> at n+1. They've posted <a href="http://nplusonemag.com/?q=node/464">a second interview with the same manager</a> and he discusses, among other things, what happened with that whole Bearn Sterns run-outta-money government bailout thing. More on the periodic table. <a href="http://www.dblfstudios.com/PeriodicTable.html">Periodically</a> is an album put together by DBLF Studios featuring 119 songs, one for each element. <a href="http://www.dblfstudios.com/Periodically%20Lyric%20Book.pdf">Peep the lyrics</a>; here's a bit of the lithium tune: <blockquote>I'm unbelievable for non-linear optics high performance jet helicpotics I have numerous commercial applications am no longer integral for atomic weapons unfortunately meth-amphetamines I do catalyze I absorb carbon dioxide when I hydroxize nuclear fusion totally relies on me I allow the criminally insane to go running free</blockquote> There is also Tom Lehrer's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elements_song">The Elements</a>, a recitation of the elements of the periodic table, sung to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_General%27s_Song">Major-General's Song</a>. Of course you can <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNfx0FO4hzs">hear it on YouTube</a>. (thx, <a href="http://www.asideproject.com/">george</a> & <a href="http://infochimps.org/">philip</a>) A pair of responses to <a href="http://efinancedirectory.com/articles/Rent_vs_Buy_Myths_That_Ruined_the_Housing_Market.html">Rent Vs. Buy Myths That Ruined the Housing Market</a>: <a href="http://www.devangoldstein.com/105/housing-myths/">Myths, Media, Motives: A Cautionary Tale</a> and <a href="http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2008/03/19/the-nonsense-of-rent-vs-buy-myths-that-ruined-the-housing-market/">The Nonsense of "Rent Vs. Buy Myths That Ruined the Housing Market"</a>. <a href="http://www.moviestamper.com">MovieStamer</a> has filled out a bit more. Some popular tags from the last three weeks: <a href="/tag/standardoperatingprocedure">standardoperatingprocedure</a>, <a href="/tag/movies">movies</a>, <a href="/tag/photography">photography</a>, <a href="/tag/lists">lists</a>, <a href="/tag/design">design</a>, <a href="/tag/books">books</a>, <a href="/tag/abughraib">abughraib</a>, <a href="/tag/video">video</a>, <a href="/tag/food">food</a>, <a href="/tag/science">science</a>, <a href="/tag/errolmorris">errolmorris</a>, <a href="/tag/interviews">interviews</a>, <a href="/tag/war">war</a>, <a href="/tag/bestof">bestof</a>, <a href="/tag/nyc">nyc</a>, <a href="/tag/videogames">videogames</a>, <a href="/tag/games">games</a>, <a href="/tag/typography">typography</a>, <a href="/tag/www">www</a>, <a href="/tag/tv">tv</a>, <a href="/tag/art">art</a>, <a href="/tag/sports">sports</a>, <a href="/tag/sex">sex</a>, <a href="/tag/architecture">architecture</a>, and <a href="/tag/religion">religion</a>.</description>

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<title>Helicopter on a turntable</title>

<description><a href="http://www.kottke.org/06/02/plane-conveyor-belt">The airplane on a conveyor belt question</a> was <a href="http://www.kottke.org/08/01/mythbusters-airplane-on-a-conveyor-belt">just recently settled</a> and we're confronted with a related question: <a href="http://www.myconfinedspace.com/2008/04/05/will-this-helicoptor-take-off/">will a helicopter on a turntable take off?</a> The image is short on details and likely a joke, but let's assume that the turntable will match the speed of the helicopter's rotor (and further that the rotor's speed is measured relative to the helicopter and the turntable's speed is relative to the ground, otherwise it doesn't make much sense). Will the helicopter take off? Does it matter which way the turntable is spinning relative to the rotor? (thx, daniel)</description>

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<title>Business guru Lenny Dykstra</title>

<description>Just got around to reading <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/24/080324fa_fact_mcgrath?currentPage=all">Ben McGrath's New Yorker profile of Lenny Dykstra</a>, the former baseball All-Star who has, somewhat improbably, become rich post-baseball as a business owner and day trader. <blockquote>Dykstra last played in the majors in 1996, at age thirty-three. Improbably, he has since become a successful day trader, and he let me know that he owns both a Maybach ("the best car") and a Gulfstream ("the best jet").</blockquote> But maybe not so improbably...Dykstra has a canny sense for business: <blockquote>Dykstra chose car washes, he says, because of the automobile-centric culture in California, and because "it was a business that couldn't be replaced by a computer chip." He brought his own frustrated consumer experiences to bear in creating the business model, and eliminated many of the usual array of motor-oil choices-startup, high-mileage, various blends-from his inventory. "You get the shit out of the ground," he said, referring to standard Castrol GTX, "or the shit made in the laboratory that's the perfect lubricant" (Syntec). "Meaning, it's either A or B. It's not about the oil. It's about the people. They got confused." He stocked the places with baseball memorabilia and flat-screen TVs, and served free coffee ("the good kind"), so that customers would associate the experience with luxury rather than with cumbersome chores.</blockquote> One of the characteristics of Dykstra the businessman is his constant use of baseball metaphors and comparisons. Here's a listing from the article: <blockquote>The Players Club, in contrast to the television installation, would be "major league," he explained, and to that end he was assembling an editorial staff of ".300 hitters," and lining up sponsors to match.</blockquote> <blockquote>Dykstra's business card gives an address for the "headquarters" of The Players Club, at 245 Park Avenue, which he describes as "big league-like, top five addresses in the world."</blockquote> <blockquote>Next, he took a call from a designer he wanted to hire for the magazine. "You worked for Esquire and In Style," he said, delivering a pep talk. "That's called the big leagues. It's like in baseball. You can't go above the major leagues. There's not another league. We're teeing it up high, dude."</blockquote> <blockquote>He quoted from Confucius, Dickens, and Billy Joel, and balanced straight stock picks ("Intel is the N.Y. Yankees of the chipmakers") with musings about fatherhood and current events, like the war in Iraq, seldom passing up the opportunity to draw extended sports analogies.</blockquote> <blockquote>"My approach in investing is much the same as my approach to hitting," he wrote. "I would rather take a walk or single and reach first than shoot for a home run and strike out swinging."</blockquote> <blockquote>Dykstra hopes the magazine will help players recognize the importance of marriage and family. He drew three stick figures and named them Tom, Dick, and Harry. Above Tom, he drew a man and a woman-two parents. Dick got a father but no mother, and Harry the reverse. "Do you know the studies and what they've proven?" he asked. "You should look that up, dude. Like, bad things. It's like the one-one count." The one-one count is another of Dykstra's baseball metaphors for life, meant to illustrate that some moments, and the choices they bring, are more fateful than others (i.e., the next pitch makes all the difference), or, in this case, that circumstances set in motion during the early stages of development are difficult to overcome later on. If a batter falls behind, one ball and two strikes, he's in a hole from which, the statistics augur, he will not recover, even if he is Barry Bonds; and if he gets ahead, to two balls and one strike, he wrests control from the pitcher and takes charge of his own destiny. Having two parents puts you in control of life's count, and enables you to become a .300 hitter.</blockquote> <a href="http://find.thestreet.com/cgi-bin/texis/author/?au=A1100645">Here's an archive of Dykstra's articles on trading</a> for The Street.</description>

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<title>Getting into Momofuku Ko</title>

<description>Frank Bruni, the food critic for the NY Times, wrote yesterday about <a href="http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/going-ko-ko/">the difficulty of getting a reservation at David Chang's new Momofuku Ko restaurant</a>. Ko's online reservation system is the *only* way of procuring a seat at the tiny Manhattan restaurant...no walk-ins, no friends of the chef or celebs getting preferential treatment. It works more or less like <a href="http://www.ticketmaster.com/">Ticketmaster's</a> online ticketing: you select the number of guests, it shows you the available reservation times (if any), you click on a time, and if that time is still available when you click it, only then does the system hold your choice while you fill in some information. It's a simple system; seats for dinner are released on the site a week in advance at 10am each day and the people that click on their preferred times first get the reservations. Ko takes only 32 reservations each night and the restaurant is one of the hottest in town, which means that all the reservations are gone each day in seconds...sometimes in 2 or 3 seconds. Just like Radiohead tickets on Ticketmaster. Except that diners are not used to this sort of thing. One of Bruni's readers got irritated that he got through to the pick-a-time screen but then when he clicked on his preferred time was told that the reservation was already gone. Someone had beaten him to the punch. So he emailed the restaurant for an explanation. <a href="http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/more-fun-with-ko/">The exchange between the restaurant and the snubbed patron</a> should be familiar with anyone who has done web development for clients or any kind of tech support. In a nutshell, the would-be patron said (and I'm paraphrasing here), "your system is unfair and broken," and the folks at Ko replied, "sorry, that's how the internet works". The comments on the post are both fascinating and disappointing, with many people attempting to debunk Ko's seemingly lame excuse of, well, that's how the internet works. Except that's pretty much the right answer...although it's clearer to say that that's how a web server communicates with a web browser (and even that is a bit imprecise). When the pick-a-time page is downloaded by a particular browser, it's based on the information the web server had when it sent the page out. The page sits unchanged on your computer -- it doesn't know anything about how many reservations the web server has left to dole out -- until the person clicks on a time. An anonymous commenter in Bruni's thread nails the choice that a web developer has to face in this instance: <blockquote>This is a multi-user concurrency problem that all sites with limited inventory and a high demand (users all clicking the button all at the same time) have to deal with. It's not an easy problem to solve.The easier method (which the Ko site has chosen) is to not "lock" a reservation slot until the very end. You submit your party size and the system looks for available slots that it knows about. It shows you the calendar page, with the available slots it knows about (if any). This doesn't update in real time because they haven't implemented it to know about the current state of inventory. This can be done, but it's more complicated.The more complicated method is to lock a reservation slot upon beginning of the checkout process, with a time out occurring if the user takes too long to finish, or some other error occurs (in other systems this can be a blacklisted credit card number). If this happens, the system throws the reservation slot back into the pool. However, you need to give people a mechanism to keep trying for ones that get thrown back into the pool (like a "Try Again" button).Building something like this not impossible (see Ticketmaster) but requires a much more real-time system that is aware of who has what, and what stage of the checkout process they're in - in addition to total available inventory. Building a robust system like this is not cheap.Even then, you might get shut out. You submit your party size, everything is already gone, and you never get to the calendar page. It just moves up the "sold out" disappointment to earlier in the process.</blockquote> A subsequent commenter suggests using "Web 2.0" technologies (I think he's talking specifically about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX">Ajax</a>) but as Anonymous suggests, that would increase the complexity of the system on the server side (unnecessarily in my mind) while moving up the "'sold out' disappointment to earlier in the process". Plus, that sort of system could put you "on hold" for several minutes while the reservations are taken by the folks in front of you until you're told, "too bad, all gone". I'm not sure that's preferable to being told sooner and may result in much more irritation on the part of potential diners. In my opinion (as a web developer and as someone who has used Ko's reservation system from start to finish), Ko's system does it right. You're locked into a reservation by the system only when you've chosen exactly what you want. It favors the web user who's prepared & lucky and is simple for Ko to implement and maintain. That the logic used to produce this simple system takes three paragraphs to explain to an end user is irrelevent. After all, a restaurant dinner is easy to eat but explaining how it came to be that way fills <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1579651267/ref=nosim/0sil8">entire</a> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1579652395/ref=nosim/0sil8">books</a>. This might seem too inside baseball for most readers -- the number of people interested in new NYC restaurants *and* web development is likely quite small, even among kottke.org's readership -- but there's an interesting conflict going on here between technology and customer service. What kind of a problem is this...technological or social? Bruni's correspondent blamed the technology and much of the focus of the discussion has been on the process of procuring a reservation. But the main limiting factor is the enormous demand for seats; tens of thousands of people a week vying for a few hundred seats per week. The technology is largely irrelevent; whatever Ko does, however well the reservation system works or doesn't work, nearly all of the people interacting with the restaurant are going to be disappointed that they didn't get in.</description>

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<title>Visual conversation layers</title>

<description>From Joerg's Colberg's <a href="http://www.jmcolberg.com/weblog/2008/03/the_quest_for_the_most_wanted.html">search for the most wanted photo on the web</a>, perhaps <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/acastellano/181730235/">the most heavily annotated photo</a> on Flickr: <img src="http://www.kottke.org/plus/misc/images/most-annotations.gif" width="500" height="333" alt="Most Annotations" /></description>

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